UFO SIGHTING REPORT

40 Miles South-East Of Sonora, California

January 18th 2006

Date: January 18th, 2006
Time: Noticed first at 5:22pm and lasted till about 5:42pm

Good Day,

At approximately 5:02pm (PST) I went into the backyard to see why my dog was barking. While I was out there I did my general habit of scanning the skies for anything out of the unusual. A few clouds in the background along with mostly blue skies and nothing else.

I decided to rake some leaves as we had had a storm blow thru and knock off the last of them. At about 5:22pm I had finished and again glanced around the skies. This time there was what I thought was either a very bright star or perhaps even Venus in the Southern region. I thought this rather strange as I would've thought that nothing could be seen yet as the Sun was just starting to set. I observed this object for a good 3 or 4 minutes and it didn't appear to be moving which just increased my curiousity. I decided to retrieve my binoculars and get perhaps a closer look of this bright star or planet. A
few minutes later I'm zeroing in on this bright object and could tell right off that this wasn't a star or planet as I've observed both from the same vantage point and this object was much to big to be either.

Since I had a teleconversion lens already attached to my camcorder I decided to tape a bit of it as one never knows. After a few more minutes I had my tripod set up and zoomed in on the object. I was able to use a normal viewing mode with no need to use nitevision as there was still more than enough available ambient light. Then I noticed something peculiar.

At the bottom of this big bright luminous object, another smaller object possibly 1/15th (or smaller) the size appeared below the larger object. I immediately started recording and continued taping for the continuation of this event. The sun had set and I wondered if by switching to "NiteVision" mode would reveal evenmore. It was then that I saw what I thought was another object come out of the smaller object and start traveling upward above both the smaller and larger object. In retrospect, I now believe that what I thought was another object was in fact the middle star in "Orions Belt" that was hidden by both objects.

But not knowing this at the time, I actually thought that I might have encountered a craft moving away from the larger object and so followed it for several minutes. The larger object was probably somewhere between 95-110 degrees arc in the southern sky and was very slowly moving towards the west, meanwhile what I thought was another craft was moving steadily upward.

I decided to zoom back a bit and include the larger object along with the other upwardly moving object. Within about one minute of my doing so, the larger object explodes (or possibly implodes) and tumbles back to the earth with a shower of debris and smoke. I followed the tumbling pieces for another minute or so until I was not able see any more of it.

Included is a Digitaly Processed frame that shows both the large and small object and a small graphic showing the POV (Point of View) of the cameraperson and where Orion's belt was at the time.

I should point out that my cameras clock is exactly one hour fast on the video as I've not changed it yet. I also shorten segments of the 6 minutes or so of footage to show the object first in daylite and then later with "NiteVision" so as to have a point of reference for the viewer.

Location: 40 Miles SouthEast of Sonora California
Date of Event: January 18th, 2006
Time of Event: Noticed first at 5:22pm and lasted till about 5:42pm
Number of Witnesses: 2 (Myself and my dog)
Duration of Event: About 20 minutes including being first noticed by the naked eye
Type of Object: Unknown, extremely bright white and luminous
Size of Object: Had to be quite large for the amount of debris and compared to a star 15 times smaller
Shape of Object: Spheroid/Round

Approximately 17 minutes later as I was arriving for a dinner get-together, I observed a glowing luminous spheroid rapidly moving (perhaps three times as fast as a commercial airliner) to the NorthEast and was able capture 'free-hand' with a camcorder about a minute of it which I will send you within the next day. But its rather anti-climatic compared to this event...

Interesting side-note is that in our neck of the woods several researchers and myself were just commenting on how nothing has happen in the hills or the foothills of California for over a month and a half.